For the broader industry picture see "China-EU EV Consultations Conclude, World AI Summit Opens in Bengaluru". This article takes the document list from 47 export projects we have handled over the past three years and arranges it in the order a real project moves through. Each phase marks the traps most likely to catch teams first time round, and what a Shenzhen translation company typically handles at that point.
Stage One: pre-project compliance documents (two weeks before kick-off)
This is the stage most often skipped. First-time exporters usually wait until the product is finalised before engaging translators, but compliance documents are the foundation of the whole thing. A typical EV export project needs translated material well before kick-off: the source regulations in the target market (EU Battery Regulation, Euro 7, destination-country type-approval), the product business case, and board minutes translated into English. Legal translation dominates here — not because it is structurally harder, but because translators must understand the regulation first. "Battery passport" in the EU regulation must be rendered as "battery traceability label" in Chinese, because that is the official EU Chinese rendering. Get it wrong and the client submits something visibly inconsistent with the EU official version.
Our standard practice: two weeks before kick-off we hand the client a document inventory that lists each file, its source, language, word count, deadline, and whether certified translation stamp is required. The EU requires certified translations for a subset of these files — missing that detail from the plan means delays later.
Stage Two: technical documents during development (ongoing)
This is the highest-volume stage. An EV project runs over 200,000 characters of technical documentation — schematic manuals, BOM lists, test reports, fault-finding guides. AI enterprises generate even more; one Shenzhen AI medical imaging client handed over a single annotation standard for its training datasets that came in at 60,000 characters. Commercial space projects hit the other extreme: a satellite operations manual can cost half a million yuan to translate because every term must align with NASA or ESA standard renderings.
The single most important capability here is not speed — it is using one term for one thing consistently across a multi-volume document set. We always build a termbase at project kick-off covering industry terms (battery, chip, AI model, aerospace), product-specific names, and internal abbreviations. Every translator works from that termbase. Machine translation post-editing is particularly effective here: run the entire document set through a domain-trained engine first to lock in term consistency, then human translators polish and proofread — 30-50% faster than pure human translation.
Stage Three: marketing and customer support materials (two weeks before launch)
This is the test of register. An EV user manual must render "driving range" not as "range distance" but as "driving range" or "WLTP range", because EU customers recognise the WLTP standard. An AI customer support UI button "confirm" must render as "OK" or "Done", not the literal translation, because that is what local users expect. A satellite launch press release "ten satellites on one rocket" should read "10-satellite rideshare" because that is the industry standard phrasing, not a word-for-word rendering.
At this stage we bring in a second-language native speaker for a style pass — not to fix grammar, but to fix "feel". An Indian reviewer once changed all instances of "upload file" to "attach document" in an AI customer support manual because Indian enterprise users habitually say "attach" rather than "upload". That one-hour tweak can make the difference between a product feeling local and feeling foreign.
Stage Four: post-launch continuous updates (ongoing)
This is the stage most translation providers do not proactively mention. After launch, roughly 10% of the document set still needs translation — software release notes, new FAQ entries, product recall announcements, community moderation guidelines. We encourage clients to budget for this up front rather than treating every request as an emergency job.
Nearly every step above runs through document translation workflows, and some projects also touch medical translation (clinical research files for AI medical imaging) and legal translation (compliance and insurance). We publish a clear scope and checklist for each phase — contact us to request it. For the translator side of the story, "From Bengaluru to Dongfeng — Three Pathways Into EV, AI, and Commercial Space Translation" has the skill inventory.